We enjoyed a wonderful dinner with a dear friend this weekend, a UVA professor, now in his 90s. Mr. Mead taught music out of his academic and professional expertise, and he continues to conduct a seminar for a few lucky seniors to explore contemporary issues in study and conversation. Over the decades, Mr. Mead has not only instructed students in the finer business of intellectual acquisition and criticism but he has helped them learn just who they are and might be — as individuals and in relation to our world. This is invaluable instruction on the deepest and most profound level. Over dinner, Mr. Mead shared a story about teaching one of Bach’s most inscrutable and intrituiging compositions — “The Goldberg Variations.” While musical variations all presume a theme, this particular piece, he explained, never explicitly lays out its theme. (Rather, it turns out to be a bass line in the introductory aria.) The piece seems then, in a manner, to be all variation. One student, having chosen to write his final exam essay on it, added below his honor code signature, “I have lived the variations and am looking for the theme.” Such, it woiuld seem, is life.
